Eligibility Criteria (EC) comprise an important part of a clinical study, being determinant of its cost, duration and overall success. Their formal, computer-processable description can significantly improve clinical trial design and conduction by enabling their intelligent processing, replicability and linkability with other data. For EC representation purposes, related standards were investigated, along with published literature. Moreover, a considerable number of clinicaltrials.gov studies was analyzed in collaboration with clinical experts for the determination and classification of parameters of clinical research importance. The outcome of this process was the EC Representation; a CDISC-compliant schema for organizing criteria along with a patient-centric model for their formal expression, properly linked with international classifications and codifications. Its evaluation against 200 randomly selected EC indicated that it can adequately serve its purpose, while it can be also combined with existing tools and components developed for both EC specification and especially application to Electronic Health Records.
Implementing telemedical solutions has become a trend amongst the various research teams at an international level. Yet, contemporary information access and distribution technologies raise critical issues that urgently need to be addressed, especially those related to security. The paper suggests the use of watermarking in telemedical applications in order to enhance security of the transmitted sensitive medical data, familiarizes the users with a telemedical system and a watermarking module that have already been developed, and proposes an architecture that will enable the integration of the two systems, taking into account a variety of use cases and application scenarios.
During the last years, need for increased funding for national health services offered to citizens is rising [1]. The reasons are (i) decreased ratio of working population/pensioners, as well as (ii) increase of life expectancy. Thus, high priority should be given to safeguarding the reliable administration of the financial resources devoted to this purpose.This paper describes the application of a "clever" system which can be used by social security bodies (SSBs) and healthcare providers for: a) Electronic data entry of prescriptions written by doctors to patients, b) Check of prescriptions against predefined rules entered in the system for errors or possible fraud, reporting all «suspicious» cases.In addition, an integrated system for administering prescriptions was implemented, that offers the ability to query, view and print data in the format required by the user.The application was designed and implemented using Microsoft Access 2002 relational database system environment. For testing the application, data by the Greek Social Security Body of people working in Healthcare (namely T.S.A.Y.) were used; all personal information was removed.
Abstract-Public healthcare is a basic service provided by governments to citizens which is increasingly coming under pressure as the European population ages and the ratio of working to elderly persons falls. A way to make public spending on healthcare more efficient is to ensure that the money is spent on legitimate causes. This paper presents the work of the iWebCare project where a flexible, on-line, fraud detection, web services platform was designed and developed. It aims to help those in the Healthcare business, minimize the loss of funds to fraud. The Platform is able to detect erroneous or suspicious records in submitted health care data sets, ensuring homogeneity and consistency and promoting awareness and harmonization of fraud detection practices across health care systems in the EU. Critical objectives included, the development of an ontology of health care data associated with semantic rules, implementation and initial population of an ontology and rules repository, development of a fraud detection engine and implementation of a data mining module. The potential impact of this work can be substantial. More money on healthcare mean better healthcare. Living conditions and the trust of citizens in public healthcare will be improved.
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